Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 1 Memory Strategies Used By Teachers Sau Hou Chang Indiana University Southeast Published Spring 2015 Ohio Journal of Teacher Education, 29(1), 5-19. Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 2 Abstract The current study examines how teachers use memory strategies to present their lessons. Two research questions are asked. First, what memory strategies do teachers use to teach their lessons? Second, how do teachers use memory strategies in their instruction? Eleven teachers complete an open-ended questionnaire to identify the memory strategies they use and give examples how they use these strategies to teach. Rehearsal is found to be the most frequently used strategy, followed by mental imagery, elaboration, mnemonics, and organization. Representative examples and activities of these memory strategies are given to show how teachers use these strategies in their classrooms. Keywords: memory strategies, teachers, instruction Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 3 Memory Strategies Used By Teachers School learning involves memorizing a variety of information. Whether used by teachers or students, memory strategies, such as elaboration, mental imagery, mnemonics, organization, and rehearsal, are helpful in remembering information. Most studies on memory strategies in classrooms focus on how students use these strategies, e.g., elaboration (Willoughby, Porter, Belsito, & Yearsley, 1999), mental imagery (Bozorgmanesh & Mohmmad, 2012), mnemonics (Scruggs, Mastropieri, Berkeley, & Marshak, 2010), organization (Pang, 1991), and rehearsal (Tam, Jarrold, Baddeley, & Sabatos-DeVito, 2010). Only a few studies on memory strategies in classrooms focus on how teachers use these strategies. Pressley, Allington, Wharton-McDonald, Block, and Morrow (2001) noted that teachers’ instruction of memory strategy is lacking in the intensity necessary for students to learn how to use memory strategies effectively. In addition, Ornstein, Coffman, and Grammer (2009) found that teachers vary considerably in how much they use memory-relevant language, such as strategies and metacognitive questions (questions related to students’ knowledge of how memory works) that encourage students to remember information. Memory Strategies The memory strategies recommended to teachers and students include elaboration, mental imagery, mnemonics, organization, and rehearsal (Santrock, 2011; Schunk, 2012; Woolfolk, 2013). Discussion of each of these strategies is given as follows for teachers and students to adopt. Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 4 Elaboration. Adding distinctiveness to new information exemplifies the strategy of elaboration. Woolfolk (2013) explained that elaboration assists encoding and retrieval of new information because it links new information to older information. Ways to elaborate include generating self-reference examples and constructing meaningful sentences. For example, to remember how to spell the word, rendezvous, students can use elaboration to make a meaningful sentence (e.g., the restaurant will be our rendezvous). Another way to elaborate is to answer questions about new content. For example, to remember the fact that the Western Spotted Skunk lives in a hole in the ground, students can ask, “Why would that fact be true?” When students generate answers to why questions, they relate what they already know to the new information. After examining elaboration strategy use as a function of prior knowledge with students in elementary schools, Willoughby, Porter, Belsito and Yearsley (1999) got positive findings for elaboration for all grade levels when learners have access to an extensive network of information. In fact, elaboration is an effective memory strategy for both children and adults across a variety of learning tasks (Pressley, Wood, Woloshyn, Mmartin, King, & Menke, 1992). Mental imagery. Visualizing images of verbal information lead to the construction of mental imagery. The dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971) states that memory for linguistic information is enhanced if relevant imaginal information is activated, and such activation of both verbal and nonverbal systems results in the dual coding of information. Schunk (2012) suggested different ways to elicit students’ mental imagery, such as having students close their eyes and think about a story scene, steps of an experiment, or dance movement, etc. For example, to remember a historic incident, students can use mental imagery to visualize a battlefield with eyes closed. After reviewing the use of mental imagery in classrooms, Douville Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 5 (2004) concluded that mental imagery is best used in facilitating deep-level engagement in reading, generating descriptive words in writing, and concretizing abstract mathematical concepts. Mnemonics. Imagery and words can be combined as mnemonics to aid memorization. There are various types of mnemonic strategies: rhymes (e.g., “righty tighty, lefty loosey”), spelling rules (e.g., “i before e except after c”), song lyrics (e.g., “head and shoulders, knees and toes”), phrases (e.g., use “never eat soggy waffles” to remember the compass directions “north, east, south, and west”), acronyms (e.g., use “HOMES” to remember the five Great Lakes – Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior), method of loci (e.g., use the logical movement after supper to remember “a tiger” on the countertop, “a monkey” in the sink, “a hippo” in the dishwasher, and “a bald eagle” on the sofa), keyword method (e.g., connect vivid images of two apples getting married to remember “Annapolis is the capital of Maryland”). After reviewing educationally-relevant mnemonic strategy research, Levin (1994) stated that mnemonic strategies equip students with skills to acquire straightforward factual information, but fail to promote students’ independent transfer and application of information. Organization. Connecting items to one another can organize information in such a way that recalling one item also recalls other items linked to it. Santrock (2011) explained that organization makes large amounts of information more manageable and more meaningful. Woolfolk (2013) recommended the use of hierarchy to integrate pieces of information, the use of chunking to group information into higher-order units to be remembered as single units, or the use of outline to organize information. For example, to remember the 50 states, students can organize states by region (West, South, Midwest, Northeast, East, etc). To remember vocabulary, students Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 6 can group semantically related words by meanings (categories, instances, associates, synonyms, etc.). Banerjee and White (2015) found that organizational strategy is highly specific to the demands and goals of individual tasks even when tasks share commonalities such as involving the same cognitive domain. It means that organizing words on the basis of semantic category enhances memory of a word-list learning task, but organizing words on the basis of nonsemantic, phonemic characteristics enhances language fluency of a word-generation task. Therefore, organization strategy is one of the most efficient means of improving free recall in the absence of cognitive support. Rehearsal. Consciously rehearsing information over and over can somewhat slightly extend the length of time it stays in memory. Santrock (2011) stated that rehearsal works best when encoding and remembering of a list of items for a brief period of time, but it does not work well when for retaining information over the long term. Woolfolk (2013) also mentioned that rehearsal works well with highly overlearned material, such as multiplication facts, spelling words, or a play script, but it does not work well for remembering more complex and meaningful information. For example, to remember multiplication facts, students can repeat them over and over verbally or in written form. However, Harris and Qualls (2000) stated that rehearsal is primarily used for disposable memory traces, such as a single-use telephone number that would be forgotten immediately after its use. Memory Strategies in the Classroom There are only a few studies on memory strategies in classrooms which focus on the types of memory strategy teachers teach their students and the types of memory-relevant language teachers use in the class. To observe the memory strategies teachers taught to support children’s Running head: MEMORY STRATEGIES 7 learning, Moely, Hart, Leal, Santulli, Rao, Johnson, and Hamilton (1992) conducted a cross- sectional study of classrooms from kindergarten through sixth grade. They observed how teachers structured classroom learning activities in a range of subjects and how they monitored and directed children’s study. To do so, they developed a coding system to record many aspects of the teaching process, and used factor analyses to identify four factors: teachers’ responses to error; positive interactive teaching; communicating task-related information; and cognitive processes and strategies. Among these factors, cognitive processes and strategies included instances in which teachers gave suggestions about studying or learning, such as offering rationales for strategy use, providing information about appropriate cognitive processes for task performance; advising of the need for memory activity, telling children not to engage in certain study strategies, and requesting children’s questions or problems. The authors found that the most commonly coded teacher behaviors included requests for answers to questions. Instruction